It might make sense if you work at a company, but it's also used very inappropriately, I think, in the context of scientific research. The problem we have is that we collaborate between company units on Slack and so all of us have dozens to hundreds of Slack instances with separate logins. I don't know how people tolerate it.
Discord has a much better approach. It seems that slack may not be able to match it for historical, bureaucratic, and technical reasons.
I've moved anything I can to matrix and encourage everyone to do the same. A collaboration only necessitates invites to a channel. It matches the way we work and it's more flexible.
I agree, this is my main critique of Slack. Discord's approach to servers as only requiring one login for many makes way more sense. Compared with Slack's multiple logins for many, way more confusing.
I hate it as well, but here's my best guess as to why change it is unlikely: Most of their revenue probably comes from companies, which virtually always issue company emails for their employees. In that case, you'd still have the problem of multiple logins (admittedly fewer, though).
If you've ever used Discord with multiple logins, it's actually not seamless at all. You essentially switch accounts and are only able to see the chats associated with one account at a time.
Thus, not only would it probably be a non-trivial technical challenge, but they would also need to put in additional UI and UX work to make the experience better than what Discord offers. And all that effort probably isn't worth it when their money comes from customers who won't benefit from it.
Ultimately, I think if you want to run a chat but aren't providing the members with emails, you probably shouldn't use be using Slack.
I don't know about Discord that was given as an example earlier for a single login, but most tools allow you to have multiple emails with a single account (eg. think Github which most of the same companies use).
There is nothing stopping Slack from doing the same while still getting money from companies needing their service.
Why are those separate Slack instances? I've worked in environments with hundreds (<1k) users on the same Slack / Hipchat / whatever app, separated by channels, not instances. Are you talking about thousands of users, or are there some other constraints?
At the last company I worked at, Slack usage started as “shadow IT”. A team would need a better collaboration tool, but central IT was just a barrier. So the department head would agree to pay for it.
Over time, a few dozen or so Slack instances popped up.
These were eventually corralled by central IT and merged into a single enterprise instance, but this just magnified the messiness - overlap between channels/workspaces, vastly different usage habits by department, etc.
Most of this happened pre-Pandemic, at a time when collaboration tools were 2nd class citizens, and nobody cared too much about the sprawl.
I'm just answering the question about why there were multiple instances. I don't think starting with a single instance is magic either. I do think starting from many and then converging accelerates the mess a bit.
I didn't say this was the fault of Slack. I was answering the question about why multiple instances might exist.
On the subject of Teams, if you want to see something worse than dozens of Slack instances merged into one, it's what happens when those are subsequently migrated to Microsoft Teams, with one team created per Slack channel. Not recommended.
Also not Microsoft's fault. The effectiveness of these tools depends highly on the implementation.
We have slack and teams. Teams is awful, it’s silo based, separate discussions in tiny areas.
Slack means silo walls break down, channels are formed and disintegrate by people with stuff to contribute in an agile way, rather than a team structure which takes years to change.
Discord has a much better approach. It seems that slack may not be able to match it for historical, bureaucratic, and technical reasons.
I've moved anything I can to matrix and encourage everyone to do the same. A collaboration only necessitates invites to a channel. It matches the way we work and it's more flexible.